1.
Shhhh. Don't tell the competition ... but our real name is
"International Technology Conferences" (A Delaware
"C" Corporation). If you want a receipt or an invoice,
that's who it'll come from!!

2.
ASK FOR A PER DIEM (a daily allowance for room and
board) rather than asking for a free cruise. Chances are, a
reasonable per diem will cover much of your cruise.

3.
MAKE AN OFFER YOUR BOSS CAN'T REFUSE. Offer to give up one week
of vacation time. After all, you are taking a cruise vacation! A week's vacation
is very expensive for employers so this compromise might actually tip the scales.

4.
Does your company have a tuition reimbursement program, for
courses taken on an employee's own time? Most companies do!

5.
Emphasize the value of the conference, not the venue:

•
Tuition is less than a comparable amount of training at a
developer's conference

• On
a Geek Cruise™ the class size is typically 10–30 (instead
of 200–500)

• Our
instructors are the "tops" in their field — and are very accomplished
authors as well!

8.
The cost for an outside cabin is about the same as your typical
conference/resort hotel for seven nights.

9.
All cruises are for one week and include a Saturday-night stay over
— your airfare, therefore, is guaranteed to be reasonable.

10. There are no food or entertainment charges on a
cruise: everything, except liquor, is included.

11.
If you can't get your boss to pay for everything,
try to convince him/her to pay the conference fee, airfare, plus 3/7ths
of the cruising/stateroom fee (there are, after all, three days of
seminars). What you're left with is an exquisite, inexpensive
one-week vacation!

12.
Your boss couldn't possibly fire you — nor would you want to
leave — if you were booked on a cruise six-plus months into the
future. Further, it just wouldn't be right to take a cruise at company
expense, and then upon your return, move to another company to take
another job. In other words, a Geek Cruise helps reward and retain
high-quality, hard-to-find high-tech employees.

13.
Ask your boss when was the last time an employee took a vacation and
came back to work better educated and more informed — in other
words — a more valuable employee? On a Geek Cruise work-vacation,
you'll spend part of your personal vacation time improving your job
skills, learning new techniques, and learning new technologies. That's
a win-win for you and your employer.

14.
Finally, suggest to management that you and your peers be given an
annual conference budget to spend as you see fit. With so many conferences
available, employees are often in a better position than their bosses
to assess which ones will provide the best value to the company and
be most appropriate for information technologists.